July 15, 2010

"The messages happen just by chance. That he is interested in — in creating flesh and blood people to do the — the tragic or the comic things which people do for — for pleasure. That is, I think that one should read for pleasure, that one doesn't necessarily have to read for pleasure, but I myself read for pleasure, not for ideas. That if it's — I've got to hunt around in a book to — looking for an idea, then I'd rather do something else. I'd rather do something that's more fun than that. It won't be reading."

Faulkner sounds so inane in that quote (haven't listened to the audio). By 1957, his best work was far behind him. And he often drank too much, particularly when he had to perform at public events and especially later in his career.

Perhaps a bit of that was going on when he spoke to the lovely law student wives at UVa.

I'm with howzerdo. At home I read for pleasure and I read to learn new things (e.g., Freakonomics). At work I read so I can stay current with my field and deliver state of the art systems to our customers.

Faulkner might be drunk, and by '57 he might have been 15-20 years past his prime. But he was never inane. Ann's quote could have been something Faulkner said in 1932. That's what so many people don't get about him. He wrote to please himself. He obviously took a sensual pleasure in everything about words, and what words could do to evoke time, places, the inner thoughts of characters, the strange and mysterious things people do, and the way people interact. He loved making stuff up, and even though his stories are often brutally real and timely to the issues facing his native region, he is first and foremost true to his worship of the human imagination. I'm sure he read for the same things he would write for.

"If you want to send a message, use Western Union." (various attributions)

"The great SF entertainer Robert A. Heinlein said that writers wrote for "beer money" -- by which he meant that the writer was competing for money that the reader would otherwise spend on other things, like beer ..."Rosemary Edghill

I read for pleasure and while I once had rigid compulsion to finish any book I started, no matter how tedious--the only reason I finished never ending THE LORD OF THE RINGS when I read it in Jr. High School (I avoided the films)--now I will readily put a book aside if it is not a pleasure. However, as Synova said, people find pleasure in different things. I have zero interest in reading popular "beach books" and bestsellers--the Twilight Books or Robert Ludlum or other such material that is widely popular--but I am not particularly drawn to overtly difficult/"intellectual" books. I do not, for instance, like Faulkner, whose byzantine prose is as inviting to me as would be crawling through a thicket of brambles. I do like Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who is "difficult," I suppose, but his repetitious prose is musical and hypnotic if one applies oneself to it. I like Celine and Kafka, but they are both quite funny, actually. I have become recently an avid fan of J.G. Ballard, and I have long been a fan of Philip K. Dick. I'm reading Chris Hedges' EMPIRE OF ILLUSION right now, and just finished John Waters' latest collection of essays, ROLE MODELS. Next up will the new biography of painter Chuck Close.

I do not read fiction looking for messages or thinking of the theme, but I let the experience of the book move me as it may, (as with McCarthy's THE ROAD, the ending of which brought tears to my eyes, a rare occurrence). In the same way, I like David Lynch's movies without trying to figure out what they're "about." The experience of the experience is what counts, and so it is for books.